1. Field
This invention relates to initializing and maintaining a point-to-point connection in Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
2. Description of the Related Art
Fibre Channel is a high reliability, high speed network technology that is often used in storage networking, particularly in storage area network (SAN) environments. Many data centers use Fibre Channel (FC) for storage networking, and, in conjunction, use Ethernet for TCP/IP networks. As a result, the data center has two separate networks to maintain. FCoE is a network protocol that encapsulates Fibre Channel frames in Ethernet frames in order to allow Fibre Channel to be used over an Ethernet infrastructure. FCoE thus allows storage traffic generated according to the FC protocol to share infrastructure with network traffic generated according to Ethernet protocols such as TCP/IP.
One connection type that FC supports is point-to-point. In point-to-point, the connected devices are directly attached. For example, a server may be attached to a storage device via a point-to-point connection in FC. Point-to-point allows the connected devices to use the full bandwidth of the connection, allows more consistent performance, and provides a high level of security. Technical Committee T11 of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), which is the committee responsible for FC interfaces, and has produced the Fibre Channel-Link Services (FC-LS) (INCITS 433:2007) standard. That document, at 6.2.2.4, identifies the process for performing a point to point login in FC.
However, point-to-point connections are currently unsupported in FCoE. Those administrators who might otherwise wish to use FCoE are not able to do so if they need point-to-point connections in their network. As a result, FCoE is not yet as flexible a solution as FC. This may deter administrators otherwise interested in the standard from implementing FCoE.